


love me mercilessly

by shantealeaves



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Amputation, Blood and Gore, Breathplay, Knifeplay, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Persona 5: The Royal Spoilers, Self-Harm, Third Semester (Persona 5), Top Akechi Goro, Top Drop, consensual murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:08:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28377468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shantealeaves/pseuds/shantealeaves
Summary: "An experiment, then, to see if there's an internal logic to how all this healing works." Akechi smirks, grasping the Life Stone in one hand. "Give me your dagger."(Akira and Akechi experiment with healing items. Pain, Akira learns, is not so very far from pleasure.)
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Amamiya Ren, Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist
Comments: 15
Kudos: 187





	love me mercilessly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [relationshipcrimes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/relationshipcrimes/gifts).



> a secret santa gift for [crimes!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/relationshipcrimes/pseuds/relationshipcrimes)
> 
> i am the kind of person who never reads the tags on fics. i nevertheless kindly request that you read the tags on this fic! and if you don't want to read the tags, then i'll at least force you to read these: warning for discussion and descriptions of self-harm, warning for rather explicit descriptions of tearing bodies apart.

It’s just the two of them fighting their desperate way through Maruki’s palace when a Chimera slashes Akechi deep across the stomach. He lets out a choked off _shit!_ and doubles over in pain for just a moment, and then he stands up to continue his attack.

Instinct, and nothing more, drives Akira’s panicked call of, “Ishtar! Diarahan!” It gives the enemy on his right a chance to land a hit on him, but with healing magic washing over both him and Akechi at the same time, Akira hardly notices the damage.

What he does notice is Akechi shoving him harshly the moment the battle is over and shouting, “What the _fuck_ was that!”

Later, when they’ve reached a safe room and Akira’s popped Chewing Soul after Chewing Soul through their intensely awkward silence, Akechi finally clears his throat. “I...apologize,” he says. “I suppose I’m not used to having practically unlimited healing resources to rely on, much less having a team watching my back while I heal during battle. In my experience, healing is a precious resource, and some level of pain simply has to be endured.”

He turns away, ready to let the conversation go, but Akira has to know— “That slash on your stomach. The one I healed. If you were on your own, how long would you have put up with something like that before healing it?”

Akechi just laughs. He never answers the question.

Akira thinks about that for a while.

  


* * *

  


They’re nearly a dozen floors down in Mementos now, and they desperately need a break. Even Akechi has to know that by now.

Not that Akira would acknowledge as much out loud at this point.

Akechi had riled him up so _effortlessly,_ sitting in Leblanc the other day and casually remarking on how defenceless Akira was on his own. “You’ve grown so dependent on your team,” he’d smiled. “I wonder—if I took you along to show you the way I do things on my own, could you handle it?”

It was the taunt in his voice that got Akira. The way his lips bore the slightest smirk, like Akira’s failings were so obvious and so egregious he didn’t even deserve the facade of the Detective Prince as he pointed them out. It was the way he crossed his arms as he issued the stupidest, most pointless challenge. It was all those things that got to Akira, riling him up to the point that he had to prove Akechi wrong.

So here they are now. Mementos, just the two of them. Training Akechi’s away—tearing through Shadows, taunting each other whenever they accomplish anything less than total decimation on the first few hits, and egging themselves on to go, go, go. 

“No wasting time on healing, no wasting time on defense,” Akechi spat out when they were battling their first few shadows down here. He lead Akira in practically blind; the statement was the closest thing he’s given thus far to the ‘rules’ of whatever they’re playing down here. “You and your little team have more than enough practice with that. You’re here to learn from _me,_ and what you’re going to learn is this: attack first and kill them before you need to defend or heal. Got it?”

Oh, Akira has answers ready when a voice in his head—the one that sounds a little too much like Makoto—questions whether this is a good idea. He really is learning new things, he tells that voice; for all his faults, Akechi does have the unique experience among them of working in the Metaverse alone. It’s made Akira all the more cognizant of where he’s grown lazy, where he unconsciously expects to have a teammate or two covering his back.

But that’s not really why he’s here. He’s here, letting Akechi make up these ridiculous rules to a pointless game, because it’s fun.

Dangerously fun. Worryingly fun, when it comes to his role as the leader.

Because this—attacking first, thinking later—is something Akira’s trained himself out of. He is the leader of the Phantom Thieves; he has to have his eye on the long-term, the bigger picture, beyond what he wants in the moment. When the Thieves meet up after school to take on Maruki’s palace, he has to be their level-headed and responsible leader who takes things slowly and is happy with progress made little-by-little. Being the leader means his job is to get everyone home from the palace safe and sound and with enough time to do their homework.

Now that it’s just him and Akechi down here, though…

It’s effortless to slip out of that role and give in to what he really wants.

And now, after ravaging their way through floor after floor, they’ve reached one of the rest area platforms. When Akira sees those glorious subway benches, he turns to Akechi and raises his eyebrows ever so slightly, and there’s a sight—the leader of the Phantom Thieves, asking for permission to rest from their traitor.

Akechi gives a careless little shrug with one shoulder, and Akira breaks out in a smile before falling into one of the seats with a satisfied sigh.

“Don’t these things arouse a certain sense of scientific curiosity in you, Joker?” Akechi asks after a few minutes.

Akira barely hears him. He’s sitting at the bench and slowly chewing his way through the cold, slightly stale Big Bang Burger that he’d picked up and stashed in his bag on the way to meet Akechi. As he chews, he doesn’t think of anything at all, just lets his mind take in the satisfying feeling of being physically worn out, and the strange, opposite feeling of healing—of muscles going from over-exerted to ready for action.

It takes Akira a minute to realize that Akechi has asked him a direct question and is now tossing a Life Stone in his hand up and down impatiently.

Akira swallows the bite in his mouth as quickly as he can before he asks, “Does what arouse what now?”

Akechi rolls his eyes, distinctly unimpressed. He’s taken off his helmet to swallow down a few healing items of his own, and it’s a little unfair how model-perfect his hair still looks after hours of brutal fighting.

“Oh, don’t mind me, Joker,” he says, giving the Life Stone another sharp little toss before catching it. “I was just pondering whether or not there’s an internal logic behind the healing items and spells in this magical world we find ourselves in. But by all means, let us take it simply as a given that a normal burger purchased at a fast food chain in the real world can somehow stitch together magical wounds here.”

Akira considers that for a bit, frowning at the burger in his hands. “Oracle said that it was more or less like a video game. Like we basically had HP for health and magic points for, uh, magic and different foods and stuff would—”

“Yes, yes, but that’s just another means of abstracting it all away from what it really is. These are our physical bodies; there is nothing more ‘real’ to us than the body we believe we control. And yet we accept something as unreal as undoing consequences down here.”

Akechi frowns, then continues, “You’d think that Sakura, of all people, would have a bit more of a drive for _experimentation_ on this world, but of course, this is nothing more than a video game to her…”

Akira’s listening, of course—ever since Akechi gave himself away with the very first words he ever said, Akira’s learned to never stop listening to Akechi—but he doesn’t quite see the significance in what Akechi’s saying now.

Instead, Akira is following the motion of his hand, up and down as he tosses and catches the Life Stone; so it’s startling when Akechi suddenly catches the stone and grips a tight fist around it. Akira looks up to see Akechi’s narrowed eyes.

“You have no curiosity about these sorts of things, I suppose, because pain is so abstract for you,” Akechi says. “Have you ever dealt with pain, Akira—real pain that lasts a little longer than the time it takes for one of your teammates to heal you?”

Akira considers whether it would be inappropriate to bring up the interrogation room. His injuries from those officers had lasted a long time; for so long he’d barely felt like he could _move._ His pain was omnipresent and unbearable.

Akira wouldn’t call that _abstract._

He shrugs.

“It’s worth bringing from the abstract to the particular, wouldn’t you say?” Akechi goes on blithely, a small smile blooming onto his face even as he continues to look condescendingly down at Akira. “An experiment—to see if there’s an internal logic to how all of this healing works, how our bodies here can experience action and then undo the consequence.”

Now he outright smirks. “Perhaps you can’t handle such an experiment, but I certainly can.”

Then he straightens up, grasping the Life Stone in one hand. “Give me your dagger,” he asks, and Akira complies, expecting Akechi to give some sort of slightly more clear explanation of what’s going on.

He doesn’t. “Hypothesis first,” Akechi says instead. “This item doesn’t usually heal you fully, right?” he asks, holding the Life Stone up between his fingers. When Akira shakes his head, Akechi continues, “So. If it doesn’t fully heal you, how does it prioritize which wounds to heal first? Given multiple wounds, I’d say it would try to heal the deepest one first, only moving to the next-deepest once the deepest is fully healed. Any competing hypotheses?”

Akira honestly has very little clue what Akechi’s talking about, and he’s starting to get a little annoyed by it.

Taunting and baiting in battle is one thing—Akechi can back up his provocations with action, and Akira can give as good as he gets—but here, it’s like Akechi is having fun saying things that are just abstract enough to be incoherent. Akira wishes Akechi would just _tell him_ what he really means.

Then Akechi brings the dagger down in one smooth motion across his wrist, then down the top of his thigh.

When Akechi lets out an involuntary gasp and when those cuts let out sudden, violent sprays of blood, Akira clues in.

Akira doesn’t even realize he’s moved before his body acts for him; suddenly he’s lunging across the room to Akechi to put pressure on the wounds. Akechi holds up his free army to stop him.

Akechi pries open the new tears on his sleeve and pants leg, widening the opening and pulling it apart so that they can see the wounds better. The one on his leg is bleeding profusely and is gushing more blood by the second; the one on his arm is more shallow, with blood steadily if rapidly streaming out.

“Now,” Akechi says, his voice only slightly tighter than usual, “let’s see if my hypothesis is correct.” With that, he pops the Life Stone into his mouth, swallowing it in one go.

After a few seconds, Akechi tilts his head at his wounds. “Huh, look—they both healed around the same rate,” he says, prodding again at the tears in his suit so he can see better. Akira is busy watching his face go through a variety of emotions, most of them investigatory and all of them a little bit adorable.

“So they both healed at around the same rate, first stopping the bleeding and then knitting the skin together—but the deeper one isn’t quite fully healed. It applies the same base level of healing everywhere, then, prioritizing quantity…”

He’s muttering to himself by now, and Akira has stopped paying attention; instead, he’s looking at the skin underneath those torn-open holes in Akechi’s costume. Akira stairs at the half-healed wounds there. Somehow, the healing items have swept up most of the blood around the cuts, as well.

Akechi pops something into his mouth—another healing item to finish the job, probably—Akira keeps staring, transfixed, as the wound quickly finishes knitting itself up. It scabs over into a tender pink scar, then disappears completely. The blood, too, is entirely gone now, leaving nothing but smooth, creamy skin showing beneath those tears of Akechi’s suit.

That, admittedly, is its own sort of transfixing.

There’s silence between them as Akira struggles but fails to tear his eyes away from the skin Akechi’s revealed. Finally, Akechi clears his throat and says, “Well, then. Should we get—”

“Any good experiment should be replicated for accuracy, right?” Akira interrupts before he loses his nerve. He’s digging into his pockets to find another Life Stone as quick as he can. “Make sure it wasn’t a fluke.”

When he finds one, he looks up at Akechi with a smile—and Akechi is just staring at him with this mouth slightly agape.

Then he rolls his eyes, shakes his head, and hands Akira’s dagger back to him.

 _You get it,_ Akira thinks, smirking as he accepts the blade back. _I won’t lose to you here._

Akechi gives Akira a dismissive wave and mutters that Akira can do whatever he likes. He goes back to crossing his arms and leaning moodily against the wall—but Akira sees that Akechi’s still watching him from the corner of his eye, rather intently.

Akira smirks. Well, he can put on a show.

He shrugs off his jacket to expose the skin on his left arm. It’ll be easy now—just one little slash across his forearm, one on his leg, just like Akechi.

Akechi did it so easily, after all. One effortless motion. Akira won’t let himself be outdone here, not when Akechi’s watching him.

He won’t.

It was—so easy for Akechi, wasn’t it—Akechi, who’s watching Akira from the corner, staring at him, really.

His rival’s eyes on him. Can’t let him down.

Just do what Akechi did. Just a cut down the skin of his wrist, then across his leg.

No, more. Can’t just match Akechi, has to beat him.

Just cut himself.

Akira holds out his shaking left arm to cut down into, and—

And he can’t do it, because—

—because pain, it turns out, isn’t such an abstract concept for Akira Kurusu.

Not at all. Not even from before the interrogation room.

He knows pain. But he’d never done this—never exactly this, blade to wrist. It was too obvious, he’d thought, too attention-seeking.

Too honest, in reality.

Because the way he did it—the way he did it didn’t quite count as quote unquote self, quote unquote harm. He wasn’t hurting _himself_ if pain just happened _to_ him. In that case, it was just pain.

So it didn’t count when he threw himself into the roughest sports he could find, bringing home more injuries than he ever let his parents see. It didn’t count when he burned himself while cooking and let the red-hot metal of the pan sear into his skin for a second after the initial realization.

And it certainly doesn’t count when he throws himself in front of enemy after enemy in the Metaverse.

Getting injured is just part of the job as a Phantom Thief. Maybe they call him a little reckless, a little careless. Maybe, sometimes, he holds off on healing himself so he can feel the pain a little longer. It doesn’t matter—he’s not the one who caused the pain.

The shadows did it, not him.

Deep down he knows what it is. He knows when an excuse is just an excuse. But at least he never let it get to _this,_ he’d always told himself. He’d never held a blade and cut into his own skin.

That would be far too honest.

When Akira looks up, Akechi’s starting at him.

Akira realizes, all of a sudden, that he’s been standing here for a while now, maybe over a minute, with his blade poised above his arm. Frozen, completely.

Akira looks up, and when their eyes meet, it’s like something shifts.

It’s different if it’s someone else who’s doing it. And here—here’s someone who might do it.

Wordlessly, Akira twirls the dagger around. Just a half rotation, so that now he’s holding the blade in his hand and extending the hilt towards Akechi.

He raises an eyebrow in invitation.

Akechi is still for just a moment. His eyes are boring into Akira’s, searching, searching.

Then, slowly, he walks towards Akira. He grasps the hilt in his hand. And he whispers, low and quiet, “With pleasure, Joker.”

The words hit Akira like he’s been shoved, like he’s been drowned, like he’s been set on fire.

The words go straight to his dick.

It’s getting hard to breathe now with the way Akechi is approaching him, pushing Akira down into the seat and looming over him like Akira is a shadow that Akechi is about to tear apart with his bare hands.

Akira almost reflexively presses himself as far back into the bench as he can, just a shift of a few millimeters—but Akechi notices, and like a predator closing in on prey as soon as it betrays a weakness he moves swiftly and deadly to bracket Akira in with his entire body. One hand braces himself against the wall behind Akira, one leg is kneeling on the bench between Akira’s thighs. He’s fully dominating Akira’s space, and Akira’s so thoroughly frozen that he doesn’t notice as Akechi raises the dagger and gives him two precise slashes, one across his arm and one across his thigh.

He doesn’t notice, at least, until he feels the bright pain singing across his skin, and that pain is like gasping in his first breath of air after suffocating. When Akechi starts to pull away, it’s not something he thinks about—no, it’s something he _needs,_ something he needs like he needs air to breathe—it’s something deep within himself that compels him to grab at Akechi’s hand desperately with his own and gasp out, “ _More.”_

They both freeze.

Akechi’s eyes go wide as he looks down at Akira’s red-gloved hand clenched around Akechi’s own hand and the hilt of the dagger. Then his eyes move to Akira’s forearm, to the blood streaming from the slash, and down to the tear in his pants at the top of his thigh opening up to still more blood.

He imagines Akechi licking that blood, tongue pressed to Akira’s forearm. Akira doesn’t know where that thought comes from, but when Akechi’s gaze finally returns to Akira’s face, that’s he’s thinking about—and Akira can’t help but lick his lips.

Akechi’s eyes follow that movement, too.

“I need—” Akira’s voice shakes and shatters. He’s breathless, somehow; he doesn’t sound like himself. “Let’s see how far you can go. I want to see—how far you can go.”

“How far I…?”

“Can you—” Akira comes back to himself just a little bit. Remembers the game, the guise. “If you do more. How will it heal? What does it do if you cut through muscle? If you cut all the way down to the bone?” His grip on Akechi’s hand only gets more desperate with each word he forces past his throat.

“If you cut down that far, all the way, Akechi. What happens?”

Akechi isn’t saying anything, and Akira learns that he isn’t above begging.

“Please,” he whispers.

When he looks back up into Akechi’s eyes— _oh._

Akechi’s no longer gaping in worry. His eyelids have narrowed into a glare and his lips have turned up into a smile laced with complete disgust. He’s gone from looking _at_ Akira to looking _down_ him.

“You might pass out from the pain,” Akechi says in a taunting whisper. His voice conveys contempt; his eyes sparkle with barely-concealed hunger.

“Then you’ll just need to make sure I swallow a healing item while I’m out, right?” Akira whispers back.

“You might lose a lot of blood. I’ll try to avoid any major blood vessels, but—I can’t promise.”

“You’ll just have to be quick. And precise.”

“You’ll fight back. Instinctively—your body will fight back against the pain.”

“Then maybe you’ll need to tie me up.”

 _That_ catches Akechi off guard. His eyes go wide, and then he lets out a growl—a deep, angry sound.

“Get on the floor,” Akechi orders coldly, and there’s nothing Akira can do but follow.

Akechi sets aside his gauntlets before carefully undoing a few of the belts affixed to his costume. They’re thin, mostly decorative—but with a few of them binding him at once, they serve the purpose adequately, keeping his free arm tied to his torso, his legs bound together. Only his left arm is left untied—he supposes Akechi will hold that one down himself.

They haven’t healed the previous slashes Akechi left. It fills Akira with a disturbing sense of satisfaction, that Akechi’s letting him keep those for now.

In the minute or so it took to get Akira properly tied down and laying on the floor, the electric heat between them had cooled somewhat. Akira worries it’s slipped through his grasp and maybe Akechi will change his mind.

That worry disappears immediately when Akechi lowers himself on top of Akira.

He’s moving slowly, first standing with one foot on either side of Akira’s hips, then lowering himself down until he’s straddling him, his own hips settled right on top of Akira’s.

He _must_ be able to feel how Akira’s cock immediately jumps at that, how Akira grows impressively hard in just a few seconds as Akechi’s weight presses on him—but Akechi doesn’t acknowledge it at all. Instead he’s focused on running his now-bare fingers down the skin of Akira’s exposed forearm, through the thin rivulets of blood streaming from the wound on his left arm.

Akechi traces a fingernail through the lingering slash on his arm, a sudden burst of reignited heat that forces a hiss through Akira’s teeth.

Akechi smiles at that, moving his attention to the top half of Akira’s arm. He traces a circle just under the fullest part of Akira’s bicep, right on top of the muscle, holding Akira’s arm up to lightly drawing the very tip of the dagger about half way around. “That’s where I’m going to cut,” he says darkly. “Cut everything down to the bone. A little strip here, and all we’ll see is bone.”

Akira nods slowly. The prospect is horrifying—and it sends blood laced with electricity racing and pounding through his entire body. Akechi whispers that he’s going to tear Akira apart, and his cock pulses painfully under Akechi’s weight.

"Joker,” Akechi whispers, leaning down until his face is just inches from Akira’s own as he looks up at Akira through slitted eyes. He smiles. “You’re going to _scream._ ”

Akira swallows. “We’ll see.”

Akechi leans even closer, impossibly close now, so close that Akira can feel Akechi’s breath against his lips—

And then Akechi plunges the dagger into Akira’s arm, not to slash but to _carve,_ to break through flesh and muscle and sinew straight to the bone.

And Akira does more than scream.

His body shakes wildly, torso thrashing back and forth even as most of his limbs are tied together. Akechi uses his own legs and hips to hold Akira down, clenching his thighs around Akira’s and thrusting his hips down to keep Akira still until Akira’s scream has merged with a moan. His voice betrays a pleasure that he can hardly feel beneath the pain.

Akechi pulls the blood-covered dagger out of Akira’s arm. Then he pries the cut open with his fingers to open it up for better access, and Akira starts up another hoarse scream. His body fights to get away from the knife and out of Akechi’s grip, but Akechi holds firm, forcing the arm he’s cutting into down.

He digs the knife in at an angle to start prying the flesh away in a strip, and the strip is exactly as long as Akechi has said he’d cut but Akira can’t think about that at all because the only thing the knows is the tearing apart of his flesh as skin is peeled off and raw nerves are exposed to the air. It’s the worst pain he’s ever felt.

At least, it is until the flesh is clear and Akechi starts using the dagger to saw a chunk of muscle free, to sever a sinew, until the blade hits its first bit of bone and digs in there, just a little—

Then _that’s_ the worst pain he’s ever helt.

He doesn’t feel it for long before he blacks out.

He drifts in and out of consciousness. He never stays out for more than a few moments at a time; he’ll be unconscious, and then a newly horrible pain will shock him back into consciousness and he’ll be screaming once again as he feels every moment of his body being ripped apart.

Akechi is working methodically. Clinical, precise. He’s not even reacting to Akira’s journey in and out of consciousness, not to having to use his own body weight to counter the mindless thrashing of Akira’s.

Akechi doesn’t seem affected at all.

All the while Akira’s grown deaf to his own hoarse screams.

When Akechi starts using the dagger as a saw, dragging it back and forth to try to sever the toughest part of the bicep muscle and saws deep into the rawest part of him, it’s too much for Akira’s body to handle. He blacks out for a while this time.

When he comes to, he no longer feels the blade actively digging in. All he feels is his arm—pain, the entire length of it nothing but pain.

There’s something in his mouth. Something round on his tongue—a Bead—and Akechi’s fingers pushing past his lips to put it there.

And when Akechi finally settles it on Akira’s tongue, instead of withdrawing his fingers and letting Akira swallow, Akechi...lingers. The tips of his fingers are stroking the inside of Akira’s mouth almost softly, curiously.

Akira blinks his eyes open. Akechi’s bright eyes are the first thing he sees, hovering directly over him.

“Swallow, Joker,” Akechi whispers.

Akira swallows. The bead goes down, and Akechi’s fingers are still in his mouth; Akira hesitantly takes in the shape of them with his tongue, then gives them a gentle suck.

Akechi’s eyes close and he moans deeply, and the Bead must start working immediately because all of a sudden the top, sharpest layer of pain is removed. Akechi keeps pressing his fingers into Akira’s mouth, more insistent this time, and Akira responds in turn, pushing his hips up into the warm pressure of Akechi’s weight. He’s chasing that noise, that little moan Akechi let out; he wants more. He reaches his arm up, he has to pull Akechi closer, has to—

The moment Akira so much as shifts his arm, it sends wave after wave of anguish from his arm down his entire body. Akira screams again, and Akechi rocks his hips harder onto Akira’s cock.

“A little desperate, are we?” Akechi says, smirking through Akira’s cries.

Akira just whimpers at that, chasing the pleasure of every thrust and the accompanying sharp wave of pain when he moves his arm the slightest bit.

“So desperate,” Akechi continues. “You think I don’t see you watching me, Joker? How desperate you always are to get me alone?”

“You’re…” Akira pants for breath.

The endless assault on all his nerve endings is making it hard to breathe, leaving him heaving after every word, and he lets Akechi keep rocking into him ceaselessly for a few seconds before he tries again. “You’re the one...who keeps inviting me...for these training sessions, Crow... _you_ said we needed to train together…”

And it takes Akira a few seconds of pulsing his hips up, still trying to search for that friction, to realize that Akira has gone entirely still.

By the time Akira opens his eyes, Akechi’s face is perfectly stony, utterly unreadable. And before Akira can say a word, Akechi pushes himself off of Akira.

He unties the belt that’s trapping Akira’s unwounded arm as quickly as he can, and then walks over to the other side of the waiting room, leaning against the wall and facing away from Akira.

Akira is left to untie the rest of the belts by himself.

His heart is racing again, but this time it’s not in a good way. He starts to untie his legs.

What did he do?

Akira has always been good at saying the right things to people. He takes his time and listens to what they say, and when he plans his response, it’s like he can foresee all the possible ways he might respond and which one they’ll like best. It makes him easy to trust, he’s been told, easy to confide in, and that’s been the case for nearly everyone he’s met.

Everyone except Akechi. With Akechi, it’s like he’s always picking the wrong answer—or maybe like there never was a right answer.

When he’s finally untied himself, Akira sits and leans against the wall opposite Akechi and looks down at his arm. 

Beads are valuable down here; as far as Akira’s seen, they can heal any injury he throws them at. This injury, severe as it is, seems to be no exception. It’s taking a little longer, but his arm is filling in the blank that Akechi gouged out and knitting itself together, one layer at a time—the missing and damaged muscle and tendons simply re-appearing, good as new; the blood vessels healing themselves back together; each layer of pink skin appearing and scarring and reverting to good as new, until it doesn’t hurt nearly so much just to move it any more.

Finally, he’s left with just the phantom pain, the lingering vision of seeing his bone exposed like that, the raw agony of each of those nerves exposed and sliced, the horrifying snap of his tendon.

And then out of nowhere, Akechi says, “Break my leg.”

Akira’s head snaps up. Akechi is standing there against the wall, arms crossed, not even acknowledging Akira.

But he says it again, enunciating each word perfectly like he’s placing an order at a restaurant: “You’re going to break my leg.” 

“Akechi,” Akira says, slow and drawn out. He wants to put his hands up, to show he means to harm, like he’s approaching a cornered, feral animal. “I think we should go—”

“ _No,”_ Akechi says, a warning. “You will do this, and then we’ll be even. And if you won’t help, I’ll have Loki do it.”

Akira is gaping, he realizes, but he can’t help it because— “Akechi, we’ve gone far enough—”

“Shut up, Joker.”

Then he gives a cold little smile and adopts his sickly sweet good-boy voice as he says, "The spirit of experimentation, don’t you remember? We know that healing items fix broken bones from past experience. I simply wish to determine the parameters. You know that a cleanly broken bone heals back stronger in the real world. Is it likewise here—or is it as if the bone was never broken? And what of a less-than-clean break?”

When Akechi notices that Akira isn’t paying his monologue any attention at all—is, in fact, just staring at him—his smile quickly morphs into a scowl.

“Joker,” he growls, “I will not lose to you. What you just endured at my hand far exceeds the little slashes I gave myself earlier. Now you will do this to be, and we’ll be even.” 

God, but Akechi doesn’t know when to quit.

Is enough never enough for him? Is it possible for him to not interpret Akira's every action as a personal slight against him, as a competition declared, as something the has to _win?_ Does he get that by the time Akira had a gaping hole in his forearm where muscles and skin used to be, it was the farthest thing from being about some competition?

The worst part is that Akira understands. He understands so fundamentally why Goro Akechi is doing this that he wants to scream.

And, well.

It would be much worse if Akechi had Loki do it for him—Loki, who sometimes seems to have a mind of his own, so far from the precise control that Akira wields over his own personas, puppeteering their every move. For a persona to be able to inflict its owner with something like Call of Chaos…

It rather seems that Akechi is the puppet, there.

Akira takes a deep breath. In, then out. Better one of his personas than Loki. So, finally, he sighs—"Okay."

The noise Akechi makes in return is satisfied and superior, and Akira almost wants to take his 'okay' back, but he reaches over to grab his mask.

"You shouldn't need to tie me down," Akechi says haughtily. He comes closer to where Akira is still sitting, then maneuvers himself onto the ground, lying flat just like Akira was before. “That said, I leave the execution up to you. I don't imagine it's very easy to break the femur with just one's hands, though you're certainly welcome to try. Rather, might I suggest using a persona with a strong physical attack?"

 _You_ mightn't _, asshole,_ Akira thinks. _Thanks, but I'd figured that one out on my own._

He's not sure why he's in such a bad mood all of a sudden. But. Whatever—he'll do this quickly, heal Akechi, they'll be "even," and then they can fucking leave. Then this weird night will finally be over, and Akira will finally take care of this debilitating hard-on once he’s in the privacy of Leblanc’s bathroom, and then he'll go to sleep, and he and Akechi will never talk about this again, even though Akira probably won't be able to jerk off ever again without thinking about Akechi's fingers in his mouth or Akechi calmly tearing open his skin. They’ll _especially_ never talk about it again because of that. It'll be fine.

“Alright,” he mutters under his breath. Then, with a confidence he doesn’t feel, he pulls off his mask and shouts, “Melchizedek!”

The persona emerges in a blaze of blue fire. For now, it’s still; the angel looms over Akira’s shoulder, waiting for his command. Akechi, meanwhile, is laying still and looking almost bored as he watches Akira and his persona.

“Okay,” Akira says, swallowing. “Can you, uh, move one leg away, so I can just break the other one…”

And fuck, Akechi wasn’t _nearly_ as awkward about what he did to Akira. The opposite of awkward, in fact, if his dick had anything to say about it.

Then again—maybe the fact that Akira was immensely, horribly turned on by the horrifying pain inflicted upon him had much more to do with Akira being a freak than Akechi being cool and calm and naturally good at unlicensed medical procedures or anything. Maybe this is _exactly_ how awkward breaking a teammate’s bone should be.

Despite the awkwardness, Akechi complies without a word, spreading his legs wide so that Akira easily has access to just one, and _fuck,_ it's a little bit hot how casually flexible he is. And then Akechi's just staring at him again, waiting.

“Alright, so. I’m going to just, uh, use God’s Hand on your leg, and that should definitely break it, so—”

“No need to narrate, Joker,” Akechi says pleasantly.

“Okay. Right. I’ll just. Do it.”

Just do it! Just break Akechi’s leg! All so that Akechi can make some statement about their being equals, or how strong and fearless he is, or what the fuck ever. All he needs to do is break Akechi’s leg, and then he can get out of here.

It'll be fine.

Akira takes a deep breath, and then, before he can think about it anymore, calls out, “God’s hand!” With a downward slicing motion of his own hand, he brings Melchizedek’s giant glowing straight hand down onto Akechi’s leg.

There’s a sickening crunching sound like the bone isn’t being broken so much as _pulverized_ , accompanied by a grotesque splatter of blood out of the leg, blood and other slimy red-coated bits, too. 

But filling the room more than anything is Akechi's voice.

His initial shout is an explosively loud thing that’s punched out of him. Then the pain truly settles in and it turns into a series of shouts and groans and “mother fuck”s. His attempts to take a deep breath are strained and gasping and hyperventilating, each attempt at a breath turning into a cry of its own. His eyes are clenched shut and his back is practically arching off the ground in pain. But finally, he manages to say through his clenched teeth, “Joker— _fuck,_ god _fuck—_ check if it’s fully broken.”

Akira blinks.

“I—I’m pretty sure it’s broken, Crow,” Akira says, starting towards his jacket to grab a Bead.

“Just check!” Akechi shouts harshly. “It has to be fully broken, totally crushed,” he pants, “something impossible for a doctor to heal. That way we’re testing something _meaningful._ ”

Akira is pretty sure that neither of them has cared about the scientific experimentation part of this for a while, but. Whatever Akechi wants. He’ll get this over with quickly.

The leg of Akechi’s suit is completely torn up from Melchizedek’s attack, and Akira can see that the skin is completely mottled purple and red and black right above where the side of the hand landed.

That site is a crushed, pulpy, bloody mess.

 _Yeah, if you could see this, there’s no way you’d be wondering if that bone’s broken,_ Akira thinks. It’s hard to look at for too long, so he glances up at Akechi instead—

Akechi, who’s squeezing his eyes shut against the pain, who’s taking shallow little breaths and looking very pale. Akira can see tears at the corners of his eyes, sparkling little beads pooling on his light brown eyelashes.

...It’s weirdly transfixing. Akira doesn’t think he’s ever seen Akechi cry before. That, and the shallow, heavy breathing…

Focus.

“What...do you want me to do?” Akira asks slowly as he approaches Akechi. 

Akechi’s eyes are still closed, he seems delirious enough in pain that he barely notices Akira has gotten close. Yet he still manages to grit his teeth and say, strained between gasps for breath, “Bend the leg. Make sure it moves in a direction legs aren’t supposed to fucking move.”

Just move his leg. Got it. Just grab his foot, or maybe his knee, tug at his leg to give Akechi his “proof,” and then he can pop the Bead in his mouth and they’ll be done with it.

Akira puts his hand over Akechi’s knee, and puts barely a single finger’s weight on the side.

Akechi lets out the most desperate, wretched noise. Akira tries to press a little harder, tries to lift the knee so he’ll be able to move the leg. The moment he puts just enough pressure on the leg to shift it an inch or two, Akechi yells again.

He’s writhing now, his upper body contracting uselessly in on itself in unbearable agony. There are full-on tears streaming down his face and his noises have turned into hoarse moans, but when Akira is just about to stop and say that’s enough, it’s clearly broken, Akechi somehow manages, even as his eyes are clenched shut, to convey his rage as he shouts, “Keep going, _fuck you,_ keep going!”

Akira doesn’t want to think about the fact that the moaning, the writhing, the tears, the words—it’s getting to him.

Akechi is in _so much pain,_ and Akira’s getting hard watching it.

Hard _er_ , anyway. 

No. Focus.

Okay. No matter how delirious with pain he gets, Akechi won’t let him go until he’s bent his leg to prove it’s fully shattered. Maybe shifting it inch by inch isn’t the way to go. It’ll agitate the crushing site too much.

Up close, Akira can see little shards of bone poking up through the skin. He can’t imagine how many more little shards are there inside.

He just needs to do it in one stroke. It’ll hurt like hell, but it’s hurting like hell now, and Akechi won’t be satisfied until he does.

Akira takes a deep breath. Braces himself.

In as smooth a motion as he can, he grabs Akechi’s leg and _pushes_ it to the side.

He howls. The noise of a distressed animal, a noise that comes from somewhere deep within him. Akechi is full-on sobbing right now, and fuck, _fuck—_

The Bead isn’t so far away, but—Akechi is in so, _so_ much pain—

“Ishtar, Diarahan!”

Akira has a moment of relief as the spell washes over Akechi and the howling in pain stops.

Just one moment, though—because no more than a second later, Akira is being violently shoved to the floor.

Akechi is snarling on top of him.

His leg is still being healed—the wisps of magical energy are still wrapped around it, he must still be in absurd amounts of pain—but Akechi must have pounced the very moment the leg could bear any weight.

And now Akira is pressed to the floor, his hands pinned to the ground by Akechi’s hands, his entire lower body frozen with the weight of Akechi on top of him. Akechi’s eyes are wild, pupils nearly fully dilated, and his smile is absolutely feral as he growls, “Oh, you should _not_ have done that, Joker.”

Breaking his leg completely destroyed the left leg of his suit. Akechi takes that bare, still-healing leg and shoves it harshly between Akira’s thighs, knee hitting his erection with enough force to knock the wind out of him and make him moan simultaneously.

Akechi doesn’t give him a single second of mercy. He takes both of Akira’s wrists in one hand and presses the other to Akira’s throat, just enough to make getting air even harder, to make him feel a little spark of panic every time he tries to inhale and can’t quite get enough.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Akechi repeats. “You were supposed to give me a Bead, just like I did for you. That’s how we were playing this.”

“Healing spells are quicker—” Akira barely chokes through Akechi’s hold, but his weak attempt at words only makes Akechi press on his throat harder, words sputtering into nothingness.

“I know why the fuck you did it, Joker,” Akechi spits. “And I’m telling you you _shouldn’t. Have. Fucking. Done it._ And do you know why that is?”

It’s getting truly hard to breathe now, hard to focus—Akechi emphasizes each word by pressing a little harder on Akira’s throat, until the world is black except for Akechi above him. The shake of his head is feeble—barely there.

Akechi smiles at that, leans up to Akira’s ear, and whispers, “Because now, you’ve _really_ pissed me off.”

He releases the pressure on Akira’s throat and the very next second uses his fingernails to scratch harsh, bloody lines down the column of Akira’s neck that make a yelp catch in Akira’s still-tender throat.

“You’re fucking pathetic,” Akechi says. He’s sitting up now, sneering down at Akira beneath him. He doesn’t have his hands on Akira anymore, isn’t holding his upper body down at all by now, is just bracketing Akira’s torso with his own hands on the ground.

Akechi gives him a smile that makes his hairs stand on end, a smile that looks poisonous, and he says sweetly, “If you move, I’ll fucking kill you.”

Akira couldn’t if he tried. And he wouldn’t try.

Akechi stands up and shuffles around the room, and Akira closes his eyes for just a moment.

His mind is rapturously empty.

“One last experiment,” Akechi whispers as he settles back on top of Akira’s lap. Akira can no longer wonder if Akechi has noticed how hard he is yet; it’d be impossible not to, with how he keeps settling himself right on Akira’s cock in the most torturous of ways.

He’s reached over to grab Akira’s dagger and is turning it in his hand, not quite as proficient as Akira is with it and all the more dangerous-looking for it. His eyes are sparkling, his expression manic, and Akira can’t look away. Not even as Akechi brings the dagger down next to Akira’s shoulder, and Akira’s winces into whatever Akechi might be about to do—

But nothing comes.

Instead, when Akechi lifts his hand from the ground, it’s covered in blood. It takes Akira a second to realize why.

The hand no longer has a pinky.

Akechi seems hardly phased, and Akira watches queasily as Akechi pops a Bead in his mouth for a full heal.

What will he do if it doesn’t work? If healing items don’t, in fact, replace lost limbs? Will he just live the rest of his life without a pinky? Are they running low on Beads?

It’s hard to keep thoughts in a straight line when his mind still feels cloudy with a lack of oxygen. But his mind quiets once more as he watches Akechi’s finger going through grotesque distortions and expansions until it’s whole once more.

“Perfect,” Akechi whispers. He isn’t looking at his own restored finger anymore; he’s looking down at Akira again, smiling down at him like he’s ready to eat Akira alive.

Gently, Akechi sets down the dagger next to Akira, and then lifts Akira’s left hand. He cradles it with one hand and strokes it with the other, his bare fingers dragging along the smooth fabric of the red glove.

He’s started up the gentlest rocking motion of his hips—almost imperceptible, except that Akira is so, so desperate for friction down there that even the tiniest of movements feels like an explosion.

“You still have my glove that I gave you, right? My right glove?”

When Akira nods, Akechi smiles, pleased. “Well,” he says. “I’m not going to give you a new one. That’s the only one you’re getting, so that’s the only hand you’ll need.”

Akechi lowers his mouth to Akira’s left hand, and then Akira’s higher-order brain functions start shutting down entirely because Akechi bites the very tip of the glove’s index finger and gives it a little tug with his teeth, and oh, _fuck._ And then he moves on to the middle finger, taking the tip in his teeth and tugging, and then the ring finger, each of the tugs getting a little hungrier, a little quicker, until the glove is loosened enough that Akechi can tug the whole thing off with his teeth and toss it to the ground impatiently.

“So you won’t be needing this hand, then,” Akechi murmurs nearly lovingly, as he purses his perfect little mouth around one of the bare fingers and gives it the tiniest, most perfect sucks.

Akechi’s tongue darts out to tease the fingertips, and Akira can’t hold back anymore—he closes his eyes and lets out a moan, a moan that’s followed by a cruel laugh from Akechi.

When Akira opens his eyes again, Akechi is smiling—a smile like Akira’s fallen into a trap. Like Akechi’s won something, something he can only win if Akira loses.

And suddenly his brain puts together exactly what Akechi’s been saying—

Akechi laughs that cruel laugh again when he sees Akira’s eyes go wide, and he says, “Don’t worry, Joker, this won’t last long.” From somewhere behind Akira’s head where he hadn’t even noticed it, Akechi pulls out his laser sword and flicks it on. It hums to life, blazing bright and hot close to his face, and Akira instinctively tries to pull his hand away but Akechi’s grasp is firm and unrelenting as he holds his hand tight, and then in one sharp strike he swipes the laser sword clean across Akira’s wrist.

Akira’s arm falls limp to the ground.

Akechi is still clasping Akira’s left hand with his own.

It’s dripping grotesquely with blood from the wrist.

Akira is gaping in shock, can’t even comprehend what—his hand is—

Akechi looks at the detached hand and takes one of the fingers back into his mouth, sucking on it curiously, one of the fingers attached to his hand that is _very much no longer attached to his own arm,_ and when that thought finally clarifies it’s like Akira’s mind suddenly notices the horrifying, gaping absence of his hand.

When Akira looks up at Akechi with horror, Akechi stops laving the unmoving hand with his tongue; he smirks and tosses the hand aside, like it’s nothing. Like it’s trash.

It falls limp and unmoving to the ground.

There’s blood splattered across Akechi’s face from cutting off Akira’s hand, and he looks more insane, more alive, than Akira’s ever seen him.

He looks down at Akira, smiles, licks his lips, and says, “Gotta put pressure on that or you’ll bleed out.”

He moves his hands to the wrist, as if he’s going to put pressure on the wrist that’s pulsing and spurting blood out the hole rapidly. But instead of pressing down on it, Akechi smirks at it curiously and shoves a few fingers into the fleshy hole of the open stump, pushing aside the severed muscle and the spurting blood vessels and so much blood to grasp Akira’s bone in his own hand—

Akira passes out.

When he comes to Akechi is poised over him. He still has fingers shoved up in the hole of Akira’s wrist stump—the most horrifying thing he’s ever felt, the most wrong—but he’s kissing Akira hard and using his other hand to grab Akira’s hair and position his face where he wants it so he can just kiss him harder, deeper.

Akechi shoves his tongue into Akira’s mouth and feels out the dimensions of it like he’d done with his fingers, and the longer Akechi kisses him, Akira realizes, the better his wrist feels, until he’s able to see and focus and breathe a little less shallowly.

He’s just regained enough consciousness to be able to weakly move his tongue to kiss back when Akechi pulls off with a wet smack.

Akechi goes to wipe his lips with the back of his hand, only it’s the hand that was just a few fingers deep in Akira’s wrist, so he just smears Akira’s blood across his own face.

“One crushed Takemedic, delivered orally. Not enough to reattach your hand, don’t worry, just enough to staunch the bleeding a little. So you don’t bleed out.”

Akira thinks he reads an unspoken addendum to the end of that phrase in the wild sparkling of Akechi’s eyes: so you don’t bleed out _yet._

That thought, and the sight of Akira’s own blood painting Akechi’s lips in messy strokes, and the memory of the feeling of Akechi’s lips against his and his tongue exploring his mouth—Akira lets out a little “oh,” a groan. A plea.

Akechi looks down at him adoringly.

“Oh, Joker,” he asks, running a hand teasingly through Akira’s hair. “Have you had enough?”

Akira’s eyes snap from half-lidded and hazy to wide and focused, locked intently on Akechi’s.

In Akechi’s own eyes, he sees not just teasing, but a genuine question.

A worry, even.

Akira has to be very clear. He has to choose his words carefully.

“What,” he says slowly, narrowing his eyes, even though his voice comes out weak and breathy. “Is that all you’ve got?”

Akechi narrows his eyes right back, leaning closer again. “That depends. What more is it that you want, Joker?”

“Anything.”

Akechi’s breath catches at that. He’s searching Akira’s eyes again, searching and searching and searching.

Akira licks his lips, and whispers, “Everything.”

Akechi reaches into his pocket, not breaking eye contact with Akira for a second.

“Open up, Joker,” he says once he’s grabbed what he wants, but he doesn’t even wait for Akira to open his mouth; he simply pushes his fingers past Akira’s lips to place the item in Akira’s mouth. And this time, there’s no hesitance in the way that he traces the inside of Akira’s mouth with his fingers before pulling them out. Not when he’s felt so much of Akira already, not now.

Akira’s tongue gets the memo half a second too slow; by the time it’s eagerly trying to wrap itself around Goro’s fingers, they’re already gone.

Instead he uses his tongue to explore what’s been put in his mouth, moving his tongue all around it. It isn’t quite like the Beads he’s been swallowing—there are strange ridges on it. Which item, he tries to think, has ridges like—

The moment he realizes, suddenly all he can hear is his heartbeat pounding in his ears. It’s not just a bead—it’s a _Revival_ Bead.

Akechi laughs in his face. “You swallow that, and then I’ll know that’s all you can take, Joker.”

He leans closer, and _oh my god._ “Unless you can’t swallow it yourself. In which case I’ll make sure it gets down there somehow.

_Holy fuck._

_Holy **fuck.**_

Akechi is really going to kill him.

Akechi is giving him an out—just one swallow and they’ll stop—but otherwise…

_Holy fuck._

Otherwise Akechi will do whatever he wants.

The thought sends a rush of simultaneous absolute terror and deep desire through his bloodstream. It’s like nothing he’s ever felt before.

He needs Akechi to do whatever he wants to him, without mercy. That’s what he needs.

He looks up at Akechi and opens his mouth, sticking out his tongue to show the Revival Bead sitting prettily on his tongue.

The smirk on Akechi’s face is possibly the most beautiful thing Akira’s ever seen. It’s the most honest Akira’s ever seen him, maybe. It’s like that moment in the engine room when Akira finally, _finally_ got to see who Akechi was—only this time it’s just for him.

There’s no Shido, no revenge plot. It’s just them.

“Well, Joker,” he says, whispering into Akira’s ear. “Let’s see what you can take.”

All at once, two things happen:

One, Akechi resumes what must be his favorite position—above Akira with one knee shoved up against Akira’s groin. Akechi must feel his cock pulse as it returns to full harness.

And two—Akechi stabs him in the stomach with Akira’s dagger.

Akira gasps for breath, and just doing that _hurts._

He nearly chokes on the Revival Bead in his mouth, from the pain, from the suddenness, from not being able to breathe fully. And somehow, with all the sensation surrounding him from every angle, the only cogent thought running through his mind is— _Don’t swallow. If you swallow, he’ll stop._

Akechi seems to know this, and is watching with gleaming eyes Akira’s fight to get the bead securely in the corner of his mouth so he won’t swallow it.

He moves the dagger sticking out of Akira’s stomach around a little bit, and every scrap of his awareness goes straight to the immense pain there. “I won’t be needing this anymore,” Akechi says pleasantly as he moves the handle of the dagger just a little, “so we’ll just keep it right there. Stay still, or else it might fall out, and you won’t last too long before bleeding out if that happens.”

One finger is jostling the handle in his wound while making sure it doesn’t slip out—and the other hand brushes up against Akira’s straining cock. He keens.

His body is roaring. It’s confused—pumping him full of contradictory chemicals, endorphins and adrenaline all at once, like it thinks he’s fucking and running from a predator at the same time, leaving him blissed out and paralyzed and terrified all at once.

He can’t begin to explain the things his body is feeling right now. All he knows is that he needs more of it.

Akechi doesn’t say much after that.

He pulls out the laser sword once more, and all Akira can do is watch as Akechi positions Akira’s arm—the one missing a hand—far enough from his body that Akechi can slice off the entire lower arm at the elbow.

Akechi’s mouth on his, pushing his tongue and the crushed medicine on it past the Revival Bead and into Akira’s throat.

Then he repositions the glowing blade pointing downward—and slowly, precisely, being sure not to draw the laser across anywhere else, Akechi draws it across the top of Akira’s leg, right above the knee, until the leg is separated from its stump completely.

They both just watch, just for a few seconds, as it starts spurting blood violently. They watch as the thick arteries there pulse wave after wave of blood, so much blood, pooling out under Akira.

“Oh,” Akira gasps, but it’s more from the sheer strangeness of seeing Akechi shove Akira’s amputated leg off to the side. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t feel like much, actually—oh, but nothing feels like much, his vision is going dark quickly by the second, and all he does is look up at Akechi with trusting eyes—

He wakes up again to Akechi on top of him. Crushing a pill with his own teeth, pressing it into Akira’s mouth with his tongue; crushing another, repeat. It takes what seems like an entire sleeve of pills just to get Akira back to stability enough for him to groan lightly.

When Akechi lets him breathe again, Akira turns his head to the side. His discarded hand, the odd little stump of his forearm, the entire lower part of his leg—they’ve formed a little pile a few feet away from them where Akechi’s been throwing the limbs carelessly once he’s done with them.

It takes a lot just to draw a breath in, to let it out. He feels loud and graceless and messy and entirely exposed, and he turns back to face Akechi.

Akechi’s pulled on one of his gauntlets, but he’s careful, delicate even, as he takes Akira’s face between both of his hands. He kisses him gently.

Akira can’t do anything. He can’t properly sit up, can’t do anything but close his eyes and let himself be kissed.

“What am I going to do with you?” Akechi asks softly. The long fingers of the gauntleted hand extend almost the length of one side of Akira’s face; the fingers are splayed down his temple and cheeks and press in just slightly, a possessive grasp that draws pinpricks of blood. The other ungloved hand is gentle, cradling the curve of his cheek with his soft fingers.

“You love this so much, don’t you, Joker? You’re never going to tell me to stop, are you?”

He feels nothing but pain and numbness anymore. The world has narrowed to nothing but pain, nothing but pain and Akechi, and maybe they’re the same thing now, the same dangerous and impossible thing he’s always needed, because as Akira whimpers softly into his mouth and nuzzles into the gauntlet that pierces his skin he thinks—Akechi is the only person in the world who would ever give this to him.

“Never,” Akira murmurs.

Akechi gets to work with his clever, clever fingers. One hand, blades on the fingers, tears his skin open everywhere it travels. He swipes his hand down Akira’s remaining arm, down the whole length of it, to leave three long, deep gashes in the flesh of it, makes a gash across his chest, near his stomach where Akira’s almost forgotten about the blade still lodged in his stomach, down the soft meat of his thigh leading down to the bloody stump.

And then the fingers of his bare hand, deceivingly small and soft compared to the sharp coldness of the gauntlet—they dig deeper into those wounds, tearing open the skin further to let it bleed, to press his fingers into the gore within and touch.

He digs his fingers especially deep into a fresh wound in Akira’s side, and Akira screams at the burning, feverish wrongness of it all. It feels like the shock of a thousand volts, a million, like instead of his personas he’s the one strapped to the electric chair to be torn apart and made new again—

It’s a new kind of pain, and a new kind of pleasure, the way Akechi’s fingers make slick, wet noises each time they plunge into the gash, the way it feels like his fingers are digging through every layer of pretense straight to Akira’s core.

There’s no reason to hold back anymore. Akechi has seen his everything; he’s touching everything that Akira is right now, leaving him nowhere left to hide—and no reason to, either.

Akira lets himself moan, wanton and shameless. Moaning with the pain, moaning with the pleasure, moaning each he lets out a new noise that makes Akechi’s eyes go wilder, meaner, more disgusted, more animalistic, _more_.

And all the while Akechi’s been grinding his hips down onto Akira’s cock, relentless, torturously, until all Akira can do is scream and murmur _please, please, please—_

Finally, Akechi takes pity on him. Or, perhaps, sees it as an even more exquisite torture—he tears open Akira’s pants with his gauntlet, tearing open the still intact leg and reopening the gushing wound at the stumped end of the other.

Akira can’t really think now, certainly can’t move, can’t hardly feel anything.

But it’s okay, because Akechi is finally, finally touching him, his bare hand already slick with blood finally wrapping itself around Akira’s cock and pumping.

Akira doesn’t even know if he’s hard anymore. He’s not sure if he could be—not when he’s losing so much blood, would there be enough blood left to keep him hard?—but it doesn’t matter because it feels so good.

He begs. And begs, and begs, and he can’t do much but he tries to move his hips up in time with Akechi’s pulls, and he begs, because he can see just how hard and bulging Akechi is inside his blue-and-black striped suit. He doesn’t have the strength or the limbs or the capacity to do anything but let Akechi use him as he wants.

So he looks Akechi in the eyes and whispers, “Fuck me.”

Maybe not even whispers. Maybe just mouths; maybe he isn’t capable of speech anymore, or maybe the blood rushing and the low insistent humming swallowing him up are all he can hear now, but he mouths over and over, “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” until Akechi does.

He’s passing in and out of consciousness. When he blacks out, Akechi wakes him with a sharp slash across his skin, a flash of pain and a spray of blood to shock him awake. He’s lost almost all sensation across his body, but he feels Akechi pounding into him, feels it through his entire screaming body, and he sees Akechi hovering above him, face red and hair messy and panting as he thrusts in and in and into Akira.

“C…” is all Akira can manage to vocalize through his numb lips when he feels close, _close,_ but Akechi takes Akira’s cock into his gauntleted hand and pulls, and Akira comes, he comes, he comes undone into nothingness.

  


* * *

  


Sensation comes back to Akira before any true awareness does.

His long jacket, covering him like a blanket.

Underneath that, the rest of his clothes, in tatters.

Between his thighs—a sticky, drying mess. A thrilling soreness in his ass.

Scratch that, he thinks, twitching his fingers, his toes. Soreness _everywhere,_ absolutely everywhere. His hand is back, though. His leg too. 

There’s nothing in his mouth anymore.

Despite how sore everything is, his feels amazing. Fucked out and used up and somehow coming out of all of that brand new.

Akira smiles to himself, lazy and satisfied, as he blinks his eyes open, looking for Akechi—probably sneering over him, ready to taunt him for any of that, for all of that.

But he’s not there. Akira has to slowly turn his head to the side to see Akechi—huddled in the corner, his back to Akira. He looks so small.

“Akechi?”

He doesn’t move.

Akira tries to push himself up to sitting. “Ake— _shit,_ ” he cuts off, because he’s weaker than he thought he’d be and collapses back to the ground when he tries holding himself up.

At Akira’s sound of pain, Akechi finally whips around. His eyes are wide and his face is pale, and for a moment he just stares at Akira, taking him in.

Then he turns back around and quietly says, “Let’s go, Akira.” But instead of getting up he just turns back to the wall, head hunched down over his lap.

The last thing Akira remembers was Akechi thrusting into him hard and fast. His hair was mussed and wild, his face was red and sweaty, his clothes were torn apart from the various experiments they’d done and from tearing open his pants so he could fuck Akira. He was covered in blood—Akira’s blood. He’d been a mess, one with a tense but triumphant look on his face, and he looked radiantly, violently _alive._

Now his hair is neat once again. His clothes have somehow been mended. And his skin is clean—his hands most of all. So clean they look raw and pink, like Akechi’s somehow scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed them clean.

How long was Akira out? It hadn’t felt like more than a minute or two, but it must have been a while for Akechi to clean himself up like this.

Akira remembers how unreal it had looked when Akechi’s hand was coated in Akira’s blood, like a sleek, dark red glove fully coating the skin. It’s all clean now, but Akechi keeps looking down at his hand, keeps rubbing it nervously, like it isn’t.

Out, damned spot, and all that, Akira supposes.

Akira doesn’t have a choice but to take his time pushing himself up to sitting. He can’t tell exactly what he looks like, but it must be a mess, certainly compared to Akechi. He pulls his jacket on properly; he’ll ask how Akechi fixed up his suit later, but for now he’ll at least cover himself so that he’s no longer all bare skin with tatters of clothing hanging off his skin.

Finally, he sits down right next to Akechi, staring at the wall and sitting close enough that their shoulders are touching. He turns to Akechi and waits for him to meet his eyes, even if it’s with an empty, dull gaze, and when he finally has Akechi’s attention, Akira says, “How many more revival beads do we have?”

Akechi blinks.

Akira stays silent. Waits. Watches as Akechi’s face sinks from blankness into vague disorientation, from disorientation to slight confusion, and then from confusion into—

_There he is._

—annoyance.

“What?” Akechi asks.

“More revival beads. I’m asking if you have them.” Akira leans over into Akechi’s space—not to do anything, not because his body could actually handle anything more, but just to spark even more of that irritation. “Unless,” he says, letting a slow smirk slide its way onto his face, “that was the best you can do.”

“No, Akira. We’re leaving.”

“So that _was_ the best you could do.”

Akechi rolls his eyes and makes a dismissive little grunt, and that makes Akira practically break out smiling—because that’s much, much better than an Akechi who’s staring at his hand like he just committed murder.

Which. Well.

But Akechi has to know it’s different. He _must_ know. He must have seen how much Akira wanted it, and he wanted it to, not to kill for the sake of killing but for _Akira,_ and just the thought makes Akira almost giddy again. 

Maybe they’re fucked up, but they’re fucked up _together_ , and that means they can each give each other something no one else can.

“You won’t bait me, Akira. I don’t care how many revival items you have in your endless pockets, we are leaving right now to get some proper rest.”

Maybe he’s feeling a little bit lightheaded, a little manically thrilled, a little more in love than he thinks he maybe should be feeling after something like that.

He’s feeling what he’s feeling. So fuck Maruki—fuck the idea of a world without pain. Maruki doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. They’ll escape this world, and they’ll have forever to figure out.

“Then you’re promising me a rain check to show me _exactly_ what you can do next time, Akechi?”

Akira says it with batted eyelashes and a taunting smirk, playing up the teasing, and whether it makes Akechi blush or roll his eyes again doesn’t really matter.

But he gets neither of those, because at his words, Akechi retreats again. Goes quiet, eyes back down to his lap. To his hand.

“Next time, huh?”

And then, after a few moments of silence— “It scares me, Joker, how I’d really do anything if you asked.”

Akira laughs. “But that’s the point, Akechi—I _asked._ And you…”

But Akechi isn’t listening to him anymore, is already getting up. He’s lost in his own mind again, gone off on an entirely different wavelength, and Akira doesn’t know how to find him again.

“If you asked, I’d stay in this world for you,” Akechi murmurs, to Akira and not to Akira. And Akira doesn’t know what to do, because Akechi is standing up and walking away.

Without even looking back over his shoulder, in a whisper Akira can hardly even hear, Akechi begs: “Please don’t ask.”

**Author's Note:**

> title from [Hatef--ck by The Bravery](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl1InjS1ZPw). truly, an akeshu song for the ages.
> 
> find me on twitter: [@shantealeaves](https://twitter.com/shantealeaves)
> 
> baby's first gore; let me know how i did!


End file.
